Intel Advances Pentium Line to 'Prescott'

Looking to reinforce its domination on the desktop, Intel will release six new Pentium 4 processors Monday with the
fastest ones coming later this year.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip making giant is debuting four new P4 chips made using the increasingly popular 90-nanometer (nm) process technology (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter), and two in the standard 130-nm, including one of Intel's new "Extreme Edition" processors. While the 90nm chips were actually expected to debut late last year, the No. 1 chipmaker is hoping the smaller die size will help it keep an edge over competitors like AMD and IBM .

The new Prescott chips are hardly a secret. As previously reported, parts for the new chips have already been shipped to vendors and Intel said that all but the 90nm 3.40GHz model are ready for purchase.
That one is expected to come out in the next two months. All six support its
Hyper-Threading Technology, enhanced NetBurst microarchitecture, and contain
13 new sets of instructions, such as streaming Single Instruction Multiple
Data (SIMD) -- designed to improve 3D and multimedia capabilities.

Except for the Extreme Edition, the new chips are compatible with Intel-based 865 and 875 chipset boards and all six include an 800 MHz front side bus.

The line up includes 90nm Pentiums running 3.40GHz, 3.20 GHz, 3.0 GHz and 2.80 GHz with 1MB on-die L2 cache; a 3.40 GHz with 512KB on-die cache based
on its Northwood core; and a 3.40 GHz Extreme Edition P4 with an additional
2MB on-die L3 cache being targeted for high-end gamers and computing power
users. The company said it is already working on a 4GHz Pentium 4 and
expects to release it by the end of 2004.

If the speeds look a little familiar, it's because Intel already has a
few Pentiums that perform about as fast but on the larger Northwood cores.
Intel has said that future Prescott-style Pentiums would shift to its
Grantsdale chipset architecture.

Independent evaluators have benchmark Prescott within the existing P4 line's established ratings but Rick Whittington, an analyst with American Technology Research said investors should look forward to the margin benefits it promises even if the long-awaited "AMD crushing" is postponed.

"Intel has struggled to get its 90nm Prescott family launched but now that it has, even if with discernibly lower clock rates and functional performance than once promised, investors can look forward to sharp cost reductions in mainstream 32bit x86 processors in the several years ahead," Whittington said in an e-mail to subscribers. "With a 3.2Ghz-labeled part, at 103 watts, the first available part, Prescott will brute force ahead on the 300mm wafer train Intel has set in store for 2004-2005."

Bill Siu, vice president and general manager for Intel's Desktop
Platforms Group said the company's usual protocol is to debut a new line
with similar qualities to its existing chips but said he expects the new
Prescott lineup to represent more than 50 percent of the company's
performance desktop units in the second quarter of 2004.

"This is a new area for the PC platform," Siu told reporters during a
briefing. "These new chips take advantage of new technologies like PCI
Express, new media capabilities and consumer electronic quality audio."

In addition to desktops, Intel said the chips could also find themselves
in home entertainment centers (so called digital hubs), which are designed
for connecting the Internet and various other home appliances. Already
pledging their support for the new chips are vendors such as IBM, Dell
, Hewlett-Packard , Gateway , and Sony as well as a flock of other PC
manufacturers. A majority of the vendors is expected to announce support for the new chip this week.

Currently, the chips are being produced at Intel's fabrication plants in Oregon and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Siu said the company could easily begin to produce the new chips at its plants in Ireland and
Israel if demand became an issue.

New chips based on 90nm represent a milestone for Intel. The company has
been shifting its wafer manufacturing to 300mm and has engineered a way to
combine things like low-power transistors, strained silicon, high-speed
copper interconnects and a new low-k dielectric material all in one
processor.

The company said its 90 nm process lets it more than double the
transistor count while reducing the die size by over 15 percent. Prescott's
die size is 112 mm with a transistor count of roughly 125 million. Likewise,
Intel said its 130nm Northwood has a die size of 132 mm and a transistor
count of 55 million.

"One of the things that Intel has been able to do is advance one
generation to another," Siu said. "We continue to make the die smaller and
by doing that, we substantially improve the cost and availability of the
product."

Two things noticeably absent from the new chips are a hardware or
software solution to address a growing need for 64-bit computing; and new
security features. Siu said none of the new chips include any next
generation security features that the company is not already using.

Currently, Intel maintains a healthy 32-bit processor lineup with its
Pentium desktop processors and its workhorse Xeon server chips. So the need
for Intel to evolve Pentium or Xeon to 64-bit status seems to be a quagmire
for Intel. During the company's last bi-annual Developer's Forum, company
CTO Pat Gelsinger suggested that the need to move to 64-bit was not even
necessary until at least until 2006 or 2007. Any move prior to that might be
considered premature at best, Gelsinger said at the time considering 32-bit
addressing limit of 4GB seems to be doing just fine in the marketplace.

And while the shift to 64-bit processors is not impossible for Intel,
there is the question of whether or not the company would extend the
technology and put it in direct competition with Itanium. Intel has
repeatedly said it will wait to see how the 64-bit x86 market shakes out
before staking its claim with either compatible Pentium or Xeon chips.

Advertiser Disclosure:
Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which QuinStreet receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. QuinStreet does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.